Just a few days ago I warned that it was only a matter of time before Remainers came up with an even stupider idea than cobbling together some kind of unelected "foil Brexit at any cost" coalition led by some Remain-fixated backbencher that virtually nobody has heard of, and allowing Boris sodding Johnson to colonise the moral high ground.
Within days my prediction has come true. They've done it again!
Painting yourselves as the avowed anti-democrats intent on foiling Brexit by any means and allowing Johnson to stroll onto the moral high ground would be extraordinary strategic ineptitude, but ex-Tory constituency squatter MP Heidi Allen has come up with an even stupider strategy: Let Boris Johnson and the Brextremists crash the UK out of the EU in a ruinous No Deal Brexit meltdown, then simply undo the damage later using retroactive legislation!
As an ex-Tory you can see why she thinks this is a solution, after all, she repeatedly voted in favour of using retroactive legislation to cover up their own criminality, from retroactive legislation to magically make Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful forced unpaid labour schemes lawful, to the emergency retroactive legalisation they used to retrospectively legalise the UK state's unlawful snooping on its own citizens.
The problem of course is that the idea of retroactively reversing No Deal is dangerously legally-illiterate gibberish.
If Remainers simply allow Boris Johnson and the Brextremists to conduct a 'No Deal by default' meltdown, the UK will have legally left the EU, and put itself in an extraordinarily weak negotiating position.
Even if the UK parliament does cobble together some absurd retroactive legislation aimed at retracting our departure as if it never happened, it quite obviously wouldn't bind the EU into letting us back into their club under the previously favourable conditions.
Even if retroactively pretending that we didn't actually leave wasn't wishing for unicorns from a legal perspective, why on earth would the EU just let us back in when we'd have put ourselves in the unprecedentedly weak position of having no trade deal with them, and no trade deals with anyone else either?
If we wanted to get back in, we'd be in the position of pathetically begging them, and they'd be under no obligation whatever to give us back the extremely favourable deal we'd just thrown away.
And ludicrous retroactive efforts to force them to give us back what we just threw away would serve as a further national humiliation as the rest of Europe laughed away our impotent legally-illiterate efforts to bully them from our self-imposed position of weakness.
Even if it wasn’t legally-illiterate gibberish, the idea that No Deal could simply be undone is as delusional as the idea that the damage from austerity fanaticism could just be undone by stopping the cuts.
The shattered businesses, and lost jobs, wasted £billions, and millions of hours mitigating the chaos under a No Deal meltdown wouldn’t just magically grow back, just like the 130,000 dead from austerity cuts to the NHS and social care won’t magically rise from the grave.
This idea of retroactively cancelling No Deal is utterly absurd from a legal and practical perspective, but it's also incredibly dangerous.
It's dangerous because it creates the impression among Remainers that a No Deal Brexit meltdown can just be undone using a bit of legislative trickery.
'Just legislate that our decision to leave didn't actually happen and the whole thing just goes away!'
'No Deal Brexit isn't really a threat because we can magic it away in the future!'
'Let's just let Boris Johnson and the Brextremists push the UK economy over a No Deal cliff edge, then we can retroactively fix all the damage later!'
These are staggeringly dangerous, complacency-breeding, lines of thought.
If you're gullible enough to take centrists like Lib-Dems and CUK squatters at their word that stopping No Deal is their main priority, then letting No Deal happen based on the absolute fantasy that it can supposedly be reversed later via legislative trickery seems like utter nonsense.
But it's actually fairly easy to see what this utterly lamentable gibberish is motivated by.
Pro-austerity, privatisation scamming, welfare-vandalising, disability-persecuting, Corporate Tax cutting, public service trashing, workers' rights attacking, orthodox neoliberal centrists fear the idea of Jeremy Corbyn derailing their gravy train even more than they fear a No Deal Brexit (which will mainly hammer the poor and ordinary, not the Westminster establishment club and the other gilded classes).
In order to justify their outright refusal to work with Corbyn and the Labour left to stop a ruinous Tory-administered No Deal meltdown, they're selling themselves the ridiculous idea that No Deal is actually 'not that big a problem at all', with the impossible and legally-illiterate fantasy that it can be easily reversed with retroactive legislation after it's been done.
So next time you see any Remainer deceitfully accusing Corbyn and the Labour left of "enabling Tory Brexit" or "secretly wanting a No Deal meltdown" (despite all of their votes against it in parliament, and all their condemnations of the Tory No Deal threats), just remind them of Heidi Allen's ludicrous plan to simply allow Tory No Deal Brexit to happen based on the nonsense fantasy that it can be magically reversed at some point in the future with retroactive 'let's pretend it didn't happen' legislation.
Ask them to explain the sense in this absolute nonsense, and why she’s an irreproachable hero to Centrist Remainers despite wanting to allow Tory No Deal, while Corbyn and the Labour left-are hate figures to Centrist Remainers despite repeatedly attempting to actually block Tory No Deal chaos.
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The former Tory Work and Pensions minister and prominent Brexit campaigner Iain Duncan Smith has once again demonstrated the absolute contempt that he has for the rule of law.
In an interview on Sky News about the Article 50 case that is to be heard in the Supreme Court he had this to say about the Supreme Court judges:
"It is not their job to tell Parliament how they go about their business ...That's for Parliament to decide. I would simply advise that the Government should ignore it."
It's astonishing that somebody can be so completely and utterly wrong so many times in such a short statement.
Reversal of reality
The first and most obvious flaw in Iain Duncan Smith's statement can be seen in his claim that "it's for parliament to decide" how they go about their business.
He has the bare faced cheek to present things in a way that makes it look like him and his fellow Brexiters support parliamentary sovereignty, rather than hating it and wanting to see it scrapped so that Theresa May can just make up the law of the land as she goes along without seeking parliamentary approval.
The original High Court ruling found that "it's for parliament to decide" and then Iain Duncan Smith and many other hard-right Brexiters had a series of massive hissy fits because they absolutely don't want parliament to decide, and now the case is being appealed by the government in the Supreme Court because Theresa May doesn't want parliament to decide.
The reason this case is going to the Supreme Court is that Theresa May wants to set the precedent that the Prime Minister can make and repeal laws to suit their own interests without parliamentary approval. For Iain Duncan Smith to pretend that the Tories are on parliament's side in this case is such a brazen reversal of reality it's extraordinary.
How utterly gullible would a person have to be in order to accept this complete reversal of reality at face value?
Contempt for the law
Iain Duncan Smith's claim that it's not the role of the courts to tell parliament how they go about their business is a clear demonstration of the utter contempt he has for the rule of law.
Anyone with the remotest understanding of how the UK political system works should know that the government introduces laws through parliament, and then it's the job of the courts to determine whether these laws are being applied correctly.
If anyone in Britain should know that it's the role of the courts to stop the government acting unlawfully, it should be Iain Duncan Smith. After all his department ended up in court on numerous occasions when he was the boss of the DWP. On one particularly noteworthy occasion the courts found that Iain Duncan Smith had introduced unlawful workfare rules.
The courts found Iain Duncan Smith's workfare rules unlawful for two reasons. Firstly the rules he had introduced were unintelligible, meaning that people couldn't comply with them even if they'd wanted to. The second (and more important) reason was that Iain Duncan Smith hadn't even bothered to seek parliamentary approval before putting his hopelessly botched and unintelligible rules in place.
Instead of respecting the court ruling by redrafting the legislation so it actually made sense then submitting it for parliamentary approval (as he should have done in the first place), Iain Duncan Smith had another idea. He decided to stick two fingers up at the legal system by rushing a retroactive piece of legislation through parliament so that the unintelligible legislation would have made sense in the past had it been written that way at the time.
Iain Duncan Smith must have thought that he was incredibly smart to get one up on the judges by writing pre-dated laws, but his contemptuous little scam fell to pieces when the courts declared his retroactive law unlawful too.
After all of the legal rulings that went against him during his time at the DWP, if there's anyone in Britain who should know that it's the job of the courts to oversee politicians and ensure that they comply with the law of the land it should be Iain Duncan Smith. But even after being slapped down by the courts on so many occasions, he still petulantly tries to claim that they have no right to compel politicians to actually comply with the law!
Ignore the law completely?
Perhaps the most alarming part of Iain Duncan Smith's statement is the explicit appeal for the Tory government to simply ignore the Supreme Court if they don't like the ruling!
It's bad enough to see the likes of right-wing hacks, dictatorial Ukippers and fanatically right-wing social media extremists fostering hatred against judges and the legal system because they oppose the idea of parliamentary democracy, but seeing such a direct appeal for the government to act lawlessly from Iain Duncan Smith is something else entirely.
He's not some bloviating right-wing hack shilling for tax-dodging sociopaths like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Sky) or Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro). He's not some politically clueless UKIP opportunist with no government experience whatever; and he's not some pathetic extreme-right keyboard warrior behind neo-fascist social media hate groups like Britain First.
This guy was actually leader of the opposition for a while. For over six years he was the head of one of the biggest and most important government departments of all. He's not just some pathetic blowhard calling for the government to abandon the rule of law because he doesn't know any better, he's a highly experienced politician who is actively calling for his own political party to wilfully ignore the rule of law because he doesn't like being constrained by the law. He thinks he is above the law, and that makes him an extremely dangerous fanatic.
Iain Duncan Smith has a long track record of displaying utter contempt for the rule of law. In any sane country there would be an angry backlash against any politician who explicitly called for their own political party to deliberately ignore the rule of law, but in Tory Britain the mainstream media just reported his extraordinary comments without any critical analysis whatever, leaving the job of pointing out his dangerously lawless attitude to independent writers like me.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
It seems a long time ago that Ed Miliband's Labour helped Iain Duncan Smith rush a load of retroactive changes to his unlawful Workfare legislation through parliament as emergency legislation by whipping Labour MPs into abstaining on every vote in the process.
Iain Duncan Smith's plan to retroactively rewrite his own botched legislation came about after the courts had found that the rules he was using to force unemployed people into working for corporations like Poundland for no wages were unlawful because they were neither intelligible nor approved by parliament.
The idea was to get around a court judgement that their own legislation is unlawful simply by rewriting the legislation and then applying it retroactively so that it would have been lawful had it been written in the new way in the past. To most sane people a plan like this seems more like it should have been the plot to an absurd Kafkaesque story than the behaviour of our actual government, but unfortunately it wasn't some menacing and disorientating plot from a Kafka inspired satire, it was what the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition actually did.
Just a few dozen Labour MPs (including Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Dennis Skinner) defied the Labour Party whip to vote against Iain Duncan Smith's appalling plan to retroactively rewrite his own botched and unlawful forced labour legislation.
Even after three years it's still staggering that Ed Miliband allowed Iain Duncan Smith to write himself a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card instead of nailing him to the wall over his abject incompetence. If the Labour Party had any strategic nous whatever they would have drawn the process out as much as possible in order to drag Iain Duncan Smith over the coals of his own incompetence and unlawful behaviour. Instead they openly colluded with him, presumably because they approved of the tactic of removing the labour rights of the unemployed and forcing them to work for no wages at major multinational corporations so strongly that they preferred to help Iain Duncan Smith to defend the tactic rather than using the situation to their own political advantage.
In April 2016 the Appeal Court upheld a previous High Court ruling that Iain Duncan Smith's retroactive changes to the workfare legislation were incompatible with human rights legislation, and therefore unlawful.
Padraig Hughes of Public Interest Lawyers said "The court of appeal has now confirmed what the high court made clear in 2014 – that the government’s cynical attempt to introduce retrospective legislation, after it had lost its previous case in the court of appeal, is unlawful and a breach of the Human Rights Act ... .It is yet a further example of the reckless approach this government continues to take towards the constitution and the rule of law".
It's not surprising that so many people have forgotten about, or were completely unaware of, this extraordinary display of unlawful behaviour from Iain Duncan Smith's DWP, and Ed Miliband's utterly bizarre collusion in helping him to introduce even more unlawful legislation in order to cover up the first batch of unlawful legislation. The mainstream media barely covered this shocking story the first time around, and subsequent coverage has been minimal to say the least.
The Appeal Court ruling is a truly damning indictment of the utter Tory contempt for the rule of law, however this hugely important story has flown almost completely under the news radar because the bulk of the corporate mainstream press are clearly more interested in doing everything in their power to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's growing popularity, than cover the unlawful behaviour of the actual government.
In my view there are two very important things to note. The first is that the Labour Party is now led by some of the genuinely left-wing Labour MPs who refused to participate in Ed Miliband's ludicrous collusion with Iain Duncan Smith in allowing him to rush through his human rights denying retroactive workfare legislation back in 2013. This means that the current Labour Party would be far more more likely to hold the Tories to account, rather than collude with them like their strategically inept New Labour predecessors did.
The second thing is that this case is a perfect illustration of the real reason that the Tories want to scrap the Human Rights Act and abandon the European Court of Human Rights. The Tories hate the fact that our pesky human rights prevent them from doing whatever the hell they want. They don't want to have to ensure that the legislation they push through parliament is compatible with our human rights. It would clearly be much easier for them if they scrap our human rights so that they can do whatever the hell they like.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg inspired me to write this article by informing listeners to his talk radio show that "we want a welfare system which is compassionate".
Now pretty much everyone knows that Nick Clegg is such a turncoat that his name has become synonymous with self-serving political dishonesty, however I believe it is still a useful exercise to look at some of the welfare policies that Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat sidekicks have helped the Tories to bring about and judge how "compassionate" they have been.
Iain Duncan Smith
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The first thing to note is that anyone with the slightest real interest in building a "compassionate" welfare system would have done everything in their power to keep the moral and intellectual pygmy that is Iain Duncan Smith as far away from the welfare system as possible. Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats not only refused to veto the appointment of Iain Duncan Smith as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, they have used their parliamentary votes to ram through all compassionless (and in many cases hopelessly botched) - policies. Even worse than that, they even voted to save him from the consequences of his own blundering incompetence, when anyone in their right mind would demanded his immediate resignation.
The Atos administered WCA regime
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If you are even remotely familiar with the Atos WCA regime, you will know how compassionless it it. Not only are there countless first hand testimonies as to how cruel and inaccurate it is, the government's own statistics admit that thousands of people a year have died within weeks of undergoing the Atos administered assessment regime, and the Courts have twice declared that it discriminates against those with mental health conditions.
Despite the court ruling that the Atos administered WCA regime is discriminatory, Iain Duncan Smith has refused to halt the process, a decision that elicited not a squeak of protest from Nick Clegg nor the rest of the Liberal Democrat leadership.
Aside from the fact that the Atos administered WCA regime discriminates against the mentally ill, another enormous problem is the incompetent way in which the process is administered. Nearly 40% of people who appeal against the decision to strip them of benefits win their cases and have their benefits reinstated*. There are so many appeals against dodgy Atos decisions that it costs the taxpayer (not Atos) £50 million a year to deal with them all.
One would have thought that the company responsible for costing the taxpayer £50 million a year in appeals against their dodgy decisions would hang their heads in shame, but on the contrary, the boss of Atos earns a salary of £40,000 a week, and despite this appalling legacy of failure causing untold misery to tens of thousands of families (and costing the UK taxpayer tens of millions of pounds) he was rewarded with a £1,000,000 bonus in 2012.
Have the Liberal Democrats taken any noteworthy action to stop this appalling and discriminatory abuse of disabled people, whilst the people responsible for administering it lord it around on seven figure salaries? Of course they haven't.
The Benefits "Up-Rating" Bill
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Despite its absurdly Orwellian title (an honest title would have been the Benefits Down-Rating Bill), Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats used their parliamentary votes to push through this appalling piece of legislation, which was designed to impose below inflation rises (real terms cuts) on the incomes of the unemployed and low paid workers alike.
The Tory narrative to justify this economic attack on the poorest people in society was the utterly misleading "why should your unemployed neighbour get more than you?" argument, which is misleading on countless grounds. I'll briefly outline three.
1. The Tories are responsible for the longest sustained campaign of wage repression on record, so saying that they are going to cut benefits even more harshly than wages is like saying "We've been kicking you in the groin for three years straight, so in order to make you feel better, we're going to wear steel toe capped boots as we kick your neighbour in the groin from now on".
2. The unemployed neighbour wasn't "getting more" anyway, since an inflation matching 2.5% addition to £71 per week in Jobseekers' Allowance is actually significantly less than a 1.5% increase on the average salary of £500 per week.
3. The vast majority of people to be affected by the Benefits Up-Raring Bill are actually the working poor, not the unemployed. This is because the bill didn't just cut unemployment benefits, it cut all kinds of in-work benefits too (Working Tax Credits, Child Tax Credits, Child Benefit, Housing Benefit, Income Support, Maternity Pay, Paternity Pay, Statutory Sickness Pay ...). The fact that the "up-rating" bill actually reduces the incomes of far more working families than it does unemployed people illustrates the utter dishonesty and maliciousness of the people that devised the "why should your unemployed neighbour get more than you?" narrative.
None of these objections bothered the Liberal Democrats, who used their parliamentary votes to get the "up-rating" bill through parliament.
An interesting contrast can be made with the way the Liberal Democrats constantly bang on about how they raised the income tax threshold (the one allegad success that they so desperately cling onto). What they never say is that they voted through Tory measures like the Benefits Up-Rating Bill which are designed to snatch back any gains the working poor may have made through the raising of the income tax threshold. The Lib-Dems won't shut up about how they gave the working poor a few extra quid, but they remain absolutely silent on the fact that they have used their parliamentary votes to help the Tories snatch it all back again, meaning the only real beneficiaries from the raised income tax threshold are the already wealthy.
Bedroom Tax
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One of the most convincing examples of the Liberal Democrat commitment to harsh and compassionless welfare reforms is the "Bedroom Tax", which was voted into existence with Lib-Dem parliamentary votes and defended in Parliament by the Liberal Democrat MP Steve Webb.
The "Bedroom Tax" is an abomination which disproportionately penalises disabled people (around two thirds of all families affected by "Bedroom Tax" have disabled members).
"Bedroom Tax" is a cruel and arbitrary regime which attempts to drive people out of their homes - even though there are nowhere near enough smaller properties to rehouse all of these displaced people.
Perhaps it might be possible to consider it fair for extra charges to be levied upon on a person (or small family) that refuses to move out of a large social housing property after the council have said they need it to house a large family, despite having been offered a smaller property in return. However slamming all "under-occupiers" with arbitrary charges when there are absolutely no smaller properties available for them to move into is as compassionless as it is unfair and economically illiterate.
This lack of available smaller properties exposes "Bedroom Tax" for what it is: Yet another attempt by the Tory party to impose austerity on the poor (whilst simultaneously giving vast tax cuts to the rich).
Not only is the "Bedroom Tax" an abomination, it was also introduced in such a cack-handed manner that it turns out that some 40,000 people who have been forced to pay it aren't actually liable and should surely be entitled to reimbursement.
The Liberal Democrats didn't just use their parliamentary votes to pass this abomination into law, one of their own MPs (Steve Webb) was part of the team that devised and defended the scheme.
Retroactive "Workfare" legislation
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Another blatant demonstration of the Liberal Democrat commitment to support the compassionless Tory attacks on the welfare system was their decision to vote in favour of Iain Duncan Smith's absurd retroactive lawmaking exercise called the Jobseekers' (Back to Work) Bill, but which should more accurately have been called Iain Duncan Smith's "I'm Above the Law" Bill.
This ludicrous bill came about as the result of a court judgement that Iain Duncan Smith's mandatory unpaid "Workfare" schemes were unlawful. The judgement was made on the grounds that Iain Duncan Smith had drawn up a bunch of unintelligible rules and that he hadn't even bothered to subject them to parliamentary scrutiny before enacting them.
Thousands of people were stripped of their benefits for failing to comply with Iain Duncan Smith's unintelligible "workfare" rules, then once the court ruled that these schemes were unlawful, it seemed that the victims of these unintelligible and unlawful rules would be entitled to an estimated £130 million in compensation for the unlawful treatment they had suffered.
Iain Duncan Smith's response to this was to draw up a ludicrous piece of retroactive legislation designed to retroactively change the "Workfare" rules so that they would have been intelligible and approved by parliament had they been written that way at the time all those people were sanctioned. The Liberal Democrats happily voted in favour of this, giving their seal of approval to a truly outrageous bastardisation of the parliamentary process in order to help Iain Duncan Smith keep the £130 million he had unlawfully stolen from some of the most vulnerable people in society, and save himself from the sacking he so richly deserved.
Benefits sanctions
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One of the most merciless welfare reforms since the Liberal Democrats trashed their own political reputation by helping the Tories sneak back into power is the massive increase in the use of benefits sanctions, which leave people absolutely destitute, reliant upon food banks, or even worse, homeless.
In the last two and a half years, the number of unemployed people
sanctioned has averaged 64,307 a month, compared with 27,108 a month
between 2000 and 2010, a 137% increase. Several DWP whistleblowers have stated that this massive increase in sanctions is a direct result of sanctions league tables and intense pressure from DWP management to increase the number of weekly sanctions.
After repeatedly lying that there were no such things as sanctions league tables, Coalition ministers were caught out when the sanctions league tables were leaked to the public. As we have come to expect, the mainstream corporate press and the Parliamentary Standards Authority both allowed the government ministers that had repeatedly lied about the non-existence of sanctions league tables to get away with their lies without the slightest sanction.
Aside from the lies, there are many truly disturbing things about the massive increase in benefits sanctions, here I will briefly outline three of the worst things.
1. Thousands of people have been sanctioned for absolutely ludicrous reasons. Here are a few examples:
- 60 year old army veteran sanctioned for selling poppies for a few hours a day in the weeks before Remembrance Day, despite applying for dozens of jobs too. [source]
- Sanctioned for attending a job interview instead of signing on at the Jobcentre (despite contacting the Jobcentre beforehand to reschedule the signing on appointment). [source]
- Sanctioned after being given a training appointment which clashed with the fortnightly signing on appointment. [source]
- Sanctioned for having a heart attack during an Employment and Support Allowance interview. [source]
- Sanctioned for a month for being five minutes late for an appointment. [source]
2. Sanctions are inherently discriminatory. When Jobcentre staff have sanctions quotas to fill (which is impossible to deny given the proven existence of sanctions league tables) it is much easier for them to trick mentally ill people into losing their sanctions than it is to try and catch out the tiny minority of hard-core benefits scroungers that probably know the rules even better than the Jobcentre staff do themselves. This isn't just idle speculation, the culture of tricking "easy targets" into losing their benefits has been exposed by whistleblowers.
3. Sanctions are used to force people into giving up their labour rights. Sanctions are the means by which Iain Duncan Smith compels people to give up their labour rights and work for free on his mandatory unpaid "workfare" schemes. These schemes are not just bad for the people who are forced onto them under threat of absolute destitution, they are bad for the rest of us too. It doesn't take an economics genius to realise that flooding a market (the labour market) with free commodities (an army of tens of thousands of rightless and unpaid "workfare" labourers) will have the effect of pushing down the value of the commodity in question (the value of our labour - the wages of the rest of us). Another appalling aspect to Workfare is the unfair market advantage handed to unethical businesses that take advantage of this supply of free rightless labour over those that eschew forced labour. Yet another negative consequence is the fact that many of the recipients of Iain Duncan Smith's supply of free labour are tax-dodgers and in many cases not even British companies, meaning the profits from the reductions in their wage bill are siphoned off abroad.
Nick Clegg's commitment to compassion within the welfare system doesn't seem to extend to preventing their Tory coalition colleagues from imposing sanctions league tables (and lying about it), more than doubling the number of people forced into destitution for "crimes" such as being 9 minutes late for a Jobcentre appointment because their preceding job interview overran, nor protecting the unemployed from being forced onto unlawful, economically illiterate Soviet style compulsory labour schemes.
Conclusion
Nick Clegg's guff about wanting a "compassionate" welfare system is totally undermined by the the track record of the government that he is part of. Many of the harshest policies like "Bedroom Tax" and the cuts to in-work benefits for the working poor were only made possible by Liberal Democrat MPs votes in parliament. Even when some of Iain Duncan Smith's worst welfare policies have been condemned as unlawful and discriminatory by the courts, the Liberal Democrats have backed him to the hilt.
It is absolutely clear that the Liberal Democrat leadership value a few years of six figure salaries and their access to ministerial cars far more highly than they value the idea of protecting the most vulnerable from Tory malice, let alone building a "compassionate" welfare system.
The electoral price the Liberal Democrats are going to pay for this collusion with the Tories will be a high one, however it is impossible to feel an iota of sympathy for them that they are going to bear the bulk of the electoral whiplash rather than the Tory party that actually devised most of these schemes.
Yes Tories like Iain Duncan Smith, David Anthony Freud and Mark Hoban have been the worst offenders, but by now we have come to expect nothing more than incompetence and malice from the Tory party. Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats have had every chance to restrain Iain Duncan Smith, or even force his removal from the position of responsibility that he is so hopelessly unfit to hold, yet they've done worse than nothing, they've backed him to the hilt and voted in favour of every single compassionless (and hopelessly botched) piece of legislation he's put before parliament.
By letting a callous and intellectually stunted monster like Iain Duncan Smith run amok, they've destroyed their credentials as a "liberal" party and lost the right to expect anyone at all to take them seriously when they speak of wanting a "compassionate" welfare system. Liberal Democrats are due their imminent resounding electoral defeat, and I doubt many people will be convinced by their pathetic "It wasn't us sir - it was the big boys in blue ties" appeals for compassion before we cast our votes in the 2015 General Election.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
The economy is still in recession for the vast majority of us, but a tiny economic minority are getting rich faster than ever, and the Tories are convinced that this enrichment of the minority equates to an "economic recovery". In this article I'm going to give you a sure-fire tip for escaping your worsening economic circumstances and getting rich too.
The reason that the economy is still in recession for the majority of us is an economic policy called income repression, which is being administered by the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. If you have a job that pays less than a six figure salary, the chances are that you are getting poorer, because every single month since the Tories came to power, the average wage has grown at a slower rate than the rate of inflation. This means that your purchasing power has been diminished every single month and you are getting poorer and poorer in real terms.
People on low wages have been affected particularly badly, because as well as their wages shrinking in real terms, George Osborne and the Tories are also repressing in-work benefits such as Working Tax Credits, Child Tax Credits, Income Support, Council Tax Relief, Statutory Sick Pay, Maternity Pay and Paternity Pay. These dramatic cuts in the social security payments that are used to top up poverty wages are driving millions of low-income workers into even greater poverty.
Some of the poorest working people have experienced terrible poverty on Zero-Hours Contracts (which have spread like wildfire since the global financial sector meltdown), growing numbers of people are working for less than the minimum wage and many tens of thousands of people a month have been compelled under the threat of absolute destitution to work for nothing more than their benefits at highly profitable corporations under Iain Duncan Smith's Workfare compulsory labour schemes. One of the side effects of these unpaid workfare schemes is that they further drive down wages and working conditions for other working people, especially in the retail, elderly care and low-skilled manufacturing and service sectors.
The number of children living in poverty has risen by 300,000 in just one year and the disabled, the unemployed, pensioners and students from poor and ordinary backgrounds have also taken an economic battering in the last three years of Tory rule.
Everyone who is not experiencing massive wage inflation is being hit by the effect of high inflation. It should be absolutely obvious that the official inflation statistics are misleadingly low. House prices in London are growing more per day than the average worker earns for a whole day's work, rents are up, utility bills are skyrocketing, public transport, food, fuel and childcare have all risen in cost much faster than inflation, yet the official inflation statistics are manipulated to show a relatively low level of general inflation. Then there's hidden inflation, the fact that your mayonnaise jar or cereal packet just got smaller but the price stayed the same, and the fact that your beef burgers and lasagnas have been filled out with cheap horse meat from Romania, instead of British beef.
Whilst this has been going on, George Osborne has been slashing taxes for corporations and the super-rich. His unprecidented cuts in the rate of corporation tax have created an artificial boom in corporate profits, fueling record dividends and the obscene inflation of corporate pay. The directors of the FTSE100 companies took home an average 33% pay rise in 2010, a 49% pay rise in 2011 and another 27% pay rise in 2012. On top of all of these extra earnings, George Osborne also handed them a lucrative tax cut in April 2013, meaning that the 13,000 income millionaires in the UK get an average £100,000 boost in their spending power.
Then there's Quantitative Easing; the £375 billion Bank of England money creation scheme that provided 40% of the extra spending power to the 5% of richest households, and eroded away the wealth of people with savings and pension schemes. This isn't just idle speculation, the Bank of England's own research confirms it.
Well, I guess you're eagerly awaiting the economic tip I teased you with in the intro, so here it is.
I've spotted a correlation between a certain type of person and good economic fortune under George Osborne's stewardship of the economy.
George Osborne's father-in-law benefited for a massive reduction in the corporation tax rate for fracking companies, because he works as a lobbyist for numerous energy companies with financial interests in the fracking business. Then the Hedge Fund that employs George Osborne's best man was awarded £50 million worth of undervalued shares in Royal Mail, landing them a whopping profit of £25 million within a week as the shares rose up towards their true market value.
It seems that being a guest at George Osborne's wedding is a key to economic success in "austerity Britain".
You probably think that there's a glaring logical flaw in my advice; the fact that you weren't a guest at George Osborne's wedding in 1998. But don't worry, that's not a problem. In April 2013 the Tory party retroactively changed the law of the land in order to avoid compensating the victims of Iain Duncan Smith's unlawful mandatory unpaid workfare schemes. This means that Tories like George Osborne are quite willing to accept retroactive revisions to reality, so all you need do is retroactively declare that you were a guest at George Osborne's wedding in 1998 and then call him to demand your share of the economic favours he's handing out.
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